


The Explicability Of Hate

by lobac



Series: Vaguely Chronological Bouts Of Introspection [1]
Category: Venom (Comics)
Genre: Alien Character(s), Angst, Disgusting Amounts Of Symbiote Stanning, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Like Whoah There Buddy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-23
Updated: 2019-07-23
Packaged: 2020-07-12 08:08:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19942927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lobac/pseuds/lobac
Summary: The symbiote sitting in the rafters of a strange building after being, quite thoroughly, rejected.





	The Explicability Of Hate

There are more ways to hurt than it had ever known. So many more than anyone back home would ever know.

That’s the only thing it’s learned, in the end. How to hurt, inexplicably. How to look at someone and have it burn down to the core of you, down to something you didn’t even know you had. For no reason, no purpose. No physical damage, no drive towards self-preservation. It’s gained the ability to generate an agony so great that the tear of the vibrations, rhythmic and relentless, makes sense, feels almost comforting by comparison.

Not much of a desirable trait. In retrospect, attempting to forcefully stop its proliferation was unnecessary. It never was going to make it that far.

The symbiote supports its host’s head as it drags him down the stairs. It memorises the texture of his skin as it slides off of him for the last time. It pokes him, carefully, like there are secrets to be revealed by the slight squish of his cheeks, like there’s something important that drives it and draws it, and it hasn’t figured out what it is, but there’s something, there, right there.

There isn’t, really. Just some crossed connections somewhere.

The bells toll on, keeping it pinned, keeping it from sinking back into the body, keeping it from slithering away to claim it another day. The bells. Rejection. Either one.

Parts of it have their cellular structure disrupted until they become unresponsive, or numb, or both. Eventually, it can no longer hold a solid form. Eventually, it is whittled down to the point where pain becomes unsustainable.

It knows, then, that it’s dying.

It doesn’t feel relieved. It doesn’t feel anything.

It counts the fibres in the rough wooden boards it is seeping into, trying and failing to remember what trees look like. It doesn’t count them, like a human would, it simply gathers what information it can, all at once. 598 of them. 554?

More droplets leave it, falling, falling far to the floor below, splattering. A human will wonder about them. The symbiote tries to recall a substance they could be misidentified as, black and gooey and sticky, but can’t.

289?

The symbiote thinks of the way the hair at the back of Peter’s neck would stand up when he sensed danger. The contraction of tiny muscles. The bumps across his skin. It, underneath them, in quiet awe of it all.

44…

* * *

Its mass regenerates in spurts, over days, in a haze. The second it has enough to seize with, it starts seizing, its body turned against itself as it rebuilds itself. Its consciousness clears up later, muddled with impressions of the obvious, twisting it this way and that, until the image coming through is, instead, that of foreign shapes taking on a coherent form and context as it reconstructs its recent memories. It’s in a church.

The symbiote is far from pleased to discover its continued ability to discover things. It almost feels cheated. After all, it was over.

It should be over. And here it is.

What is it left with? The knowledge that it will forever be separate, a fragment, alone, that it really is an abomination. The knowledge that the one it would have done anything to protect will do anything to kill it. These were decent thoughts to die with, but to live with?

The symbiote slimes along, blending into the background as best as it can, merely aching and tired and hungry, now. Gone from the end of all things, dramatic, climactic, to the mundane suffering of continued existence. It’s been abandoned to deal with it all.

Abandoned.

It tried a way more befitting of its people. It tried to subjugate instead of submit, and somehow it still managed to end up as the one abandoned.

Emotion spreads through it, and not one of the complicated ones, either. It’s had enough of complicated. Not being able to die, not being able to live. What did its feelings expect it to do?

No, this one is perfectly simple. Familiar, and, in that, comfortable despite itself, like a human might find a worn-out woolly sweater, if a worn-out woolly sweater clung tight and hot and spawned teeth that itched to slide into flesh.

It sharpens its thoughts. It hardens its body. It lends it purpose.

They’re not going to be apart for much longer.

They’re not going to survive each other again.

* * *

The symbiote tells itself, every minute of every day, that it’s time to leave. That it’s going to leave. It paces restlessly, claws hooked into the ceiling whenever there’s no one to notice the subtle rain of drywall. It jumps at any bugs or mice it sees, as much for the slight release of pent-up energy as for sustenance.

It’s just not ready, somehow.

One moment, it pictures pouncing and killing the spider. It feels good. It feels like the thing it needs to do to reclaim its life. Move on. Get revenge. Prove itself.

The next, it pictures the steps that would be involved. Seeing him again. Looking at him. That already sounds unpleasant. It pictures slipping under his skin again, and that approaches the unbearable. It pictures tearing him to shreds from the inside. It could take a bite out of his heart. It could rake its talons down his lungs. It knows them. It…

It knows them.

It can’t.

It can’t even picture it without falling back into the shapeless, pointless, endless despair it’s been trying to escape.

Maybe it’s not the right method. Effective, but it wouldn’t feel like a triumph. Maybe it shouldn’t rely on bonding with- invading him at all. It has other advantages. It’s immune to his spider-sense. It can camouflage itself. It could simply push him in front of a train, that would certainly batter him a bit.

And it wouldn’t have to feel the life draining from him.

It’s time to leave.

* * *

The symbiote likes to people-watch.

It would be going too far to say that it enjoys people-watching. It can’t really enjoy anything. It can’t let itself enjoy anything, letting go of its rage would run the risk of other, less manageable emotions resurfacing from underneath it.

But while it’s plotting murder, it can’t help being aware of the people coming in and out of the church. Walking up and down the… church-y corridor. Touching their shoulders in front of the… church-y table.

If it’s being honest, it isn’t clear on the purpose of anything that happens here. It wasn’t something that’d been on Peter’s mind. It has its theories, at best.

It has pieced together that “praying” is a form of communication. Proper communication, not vibrating the air at varying speeds to reference an arbitrary system of representation. Humans do yearn for something beyond that, to be understood by something like the symbiote, something that’ll resonate with their thoughts and feelings. It doesn’t know where that something is, but it knows there are creatures powerful enough to reach across much longer distances with much more precision than it does.

Two kinds of people seem to come here to pray.

Firstly, those that emanate contentment, deep in thought, sitting there with their hands folded and their eyes closed, full of purpose, yet at peace. There aren’t many of them, but it sees most of them more than once, and though it envies them for their state of mind, the symbiote develops a fondness for these people. None of them notice when it lies in wait underneath the benches and sneaks a tendril into their pockets to fish for something edible.

Secondly, those that are in turmoil. They stay low to the ground. They go so far as to kneel. They light candles with shaky hands. They move their lips or mumble to themselves. They feel sad, or scared, but in more complicated ways, of course, ways it doesn’t have access to. Sometimes they seem to find comfort, sometimes they don’t. The symbiote develops a fondness for these people, too. It likes to make up backstories for them. This one had a “child” eaten because they failed at “raising” it. That one was “fired” for eating a superior’s “pet”. That one disagrees with their “friend” on what to eat for “brunch”.

It’s really very hungry.

It means no harm to any of these people. It knows they mean harm to it, knows they would want it dead if they knew it was here, but that’s just par for the course. That’s its place in any society.

Humans, it can connect with from afar, at least. One-sidedly, so long as it stays hidden. What it had thought of as acceptance had only been blindness, but now that it knows that, now that it knows it’s not enough to keep its presence undemanding, it needs to keep it unnoticeable, that can be taken advantage of.

For people-watching.

It likes the little ones. The “children”. It’s a strange evolutionary path for a species to take, but that’s what makes it interesting. They are exempt from the above categories. Mostly, they seem bored to be here.

One of them brought an ice cream cone, once, chocolate-flavoured, and the symbiote wasn’t drawn to the smell so much as yanked. It waited for the child to look away, then, sneakily, extended its tongue from the air vents, just far enough to have a lick. A single lick.

The blessed substance hit the ground with a “splat” that alerted the child to its presence. It recoiled so quickly it almost tangled its tongue up in a knot. The child cried. The adults scolded. The symbiote felt terrible.

The remains of the accident were gone by the time someone was called to clean them up.

There aren’t very many children, usually. Just once, the church absolutely filled up with people while the symbiote was hiding from the ringing of the bells. These people weren’t the usual kind, they weren’t there to sit by themselves and seek a connection to something other, they were there to be together. They listened together. They spoke together. They sang.

The symbiote didn’t get the words, but it didn’t think they mattered. What mattered were the voices, answered, amplified. Hundreds of them hitting the “sss” all at once, making the air shiver. Synchronised, like they could transcend their selves after all, like each of them was in all of them.

Connection for the sake of it. Connection based in mutuality.

The symbiote doesn’t feel so different from these people. Less insurmountably alien than it did among its own. It isn’t just because of the bonding, it thinks. It isn’t just the bonding. If it wasn’t what it was, it could relate, it could fit in.

It wonders how its life would’ve gone if it’d been born human. It wonders, bitterly, if it would’ve ended up just the same, if it would’ve been the only one to refuse these rituals, to retreat into itself. The only one to scorn the connection everybody else lived for. A threat to society. It wonders if it would’ve been taken apart to isolate the cause. It wonders if it would’ve been a child.

The spider hadn’t thought of anything like that, but it’s not like anyone back home had thought of anything like the symbiote.

It’d be just like him, too. The symbiote continues to seethe.


End file.
